The End of Radical Social Theory? Radicalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

Abstract

French social theory has long been fashionable, if not dominant, on the academic left in anglophone countries. In the mid 1970s, for example, Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis came close to defining the range of options open to radical social theory in Britain. Since the demise of these orthodoxies, attention has come to focus on the work of a diverse group of writers which includes Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard and their epigones. These writers would all (more or less) reject Marxist models of radical theory and practice, but would all (more or less) claim credentials as radical theorists. Indeed, each makes a strong claim that a wholly new kind of radical theory is now required, a claim which draws on a diffused but potent belief that massive historical shifts and dislocations are underway in culture and society. Whitebook’s reaction to these ‘postmodernist’ themes captures the fin de siècle atmosphere. ‘While the announcement that Minerva’s owl is about to depart may be premature, one is increasingly struck by the sense of living in the closing of an epoch’ (Whitebook, 1982, p. 53).